A Message of Peace — Page 18
M ESSAGE OF P EACE 18 and does not speak their language is (God forbid) definitely a liar. Is it not then a strange coincidence, that both these peoples have followed the same path in their dogmatic asser- tions? Likewise, the followers of many other religions enter- tain similar views, as for example, the Zoroastrians, who claim that their religion originated billions of years before the Vedic revelation. From this it transpires that the tendency (to confine the revelation of God to one's own language or the Book) is based merely on prejudice and ignorance. This is further abetted by the fact that in the dark ages of the past, people had no access to the information concerning people and countries beyond the boundaries of their homelands. This lack of knowledge on their part led them to draw the wrong conclusions. They had witnessed that God had bestowed upon them a Divine teaching in the form of a Book, and they knew that Messengers of God had been selected from among themselves; hence their erroneous impression that they had been the only people so favourably treated by God, while the rest of the world was unfortunate in being deprived of this blessing. This erroneous view has done a lot of damage to the world, and it has worked as a seed of mutual enmity and malice which continues to grow. For a long time, it so happened that a people remained hidden from others and one country remained concealed and veiled from the other to the extent that the scholars of the A ry a faith used to believe that there was no inhabitation beyond the Himalayas. When God lifted the veil, it was already too late for them to mend. By this time they were already fixed in their